Korean Conversations

They are the example dialogues in the 국립국어원 한국어기초사전 — written by lexicographers to show a word in use, not generated. 17,507 of the 21,357 in the dictionary are published here, grouped by what they are about, and 99.9% of the turns carry an English translation from the same source. The other 3,850 belong to words whose subject is too small to have a page or has too few dialogues at their level to fill one; nothing is left out for being poor.

It has a second turn. A single sentence shows you what a word means; an exchange shows you what it answers and what gets said back, which is where the particles, the speech level and the sentence endings stop being grammar and start being choices. Every dialogue here is two turns for that reason.

A set is graded by the word it illustrates, not by the difficulty of the whole exchange, so the surrounding sentence often runs a level or two ahead. Read one level below where you are studying if you want to read fluently, and one at your own level if you want to work. TOPIK 1 has 60 sets, TOPIK 2 has 69 sets, TOPIK 3 has 96 sets, TOPIK 4 has 100 sets, TOPIK 5 has 85 sets, TOPIK 6 has 94 sets.

Because a word belongs to several categories and its dialogues would otherwise be published two or three times over. Each word contributes its exchanges to the most specific category it belongs to, so every dialogue on this site appears exactly once and no two pages here hold the same material.

Not for the dialogue lines. The 국립국어원 recordings are one per headword, so the audio button on each block plays the word being illustrated and there is nothing to play for the sentences themselves. Rather than synthesise a voice, this site plays what was actually recorded.